Court theater in the seventeenth century held little interest for Soviet historians. Besides its elitist associations, it was heavily influenced by European conventions. They found it safer to explore such nativist origins of Russian theater as the unruly skomorokhi or the folk drama, while playing down the western influences on the fiery furnace play or the puppet Petrushka. Serious research into early court theater had been published before the Revolution, but was not followed up until recently. Now that the eighteenth-century has been thoroughly investigated by Lyudmila Starikova and others, attention turns to what came before.
Russia's Theatrical Past is an attempt to synthesize previous inquiries into the beginnings of Russian dramatic theater, but with a difference. First, it is the product of a team of scholars, each of whom brings a special expertise, disciplinary and linguistic, to the effort. The emphasis on music is especially thorough and very welcome. Next, it covers a broad range of performance from ropewalkers to keyboard players to scholastic drama to the Elizabethan stage. Finally and most important, it adopts an international approach, which the authors term “intertheater” and “intertheatricality” (7–8). By this, they mean the ways in which modes and methods of performance cannot be pinned down to discrete national or ethnic environments, but travel freely across borders. The back-and-forth of such “popular entertainments,” unmoored to any particular society, perpetuates performance traditions and helps cross-pollinate them.
The authors are Slavicists and musicologists and so fail to point out that this is currently a leading trend among theater historians. In recent years, the study of performance has announced itself to be increasingly “transglobal,” “transnational,” “cross-border,” and even “omnilocal.” A work such as Transnational Connections in Early Modern Theatre (2019) probably appeared too late for the authors to have referred to it; but many earlier published discussions of this approach also go unnoticed. Working along parallel lines, however, the authors have managed to make a major contribution to the field.
Russia's Theatrical Past is a splendid example of how to practice this kind of inquiry. From time immemorial, the “professionals” in the performing arts have been the strolling players and carnival folk, outside conventional society. As such, they have usually been sidelined or ignored in studies of dramatic theater. This book engages the reader from the start by describing the failed attempt of a group of German ropewalkers to get a booking in Russia in 1644. It continues this theme, interweaving itinerant troupes and professional entertainers with amateur and school performers to demonstrate how intricately the threads become intertwined. A buffoon like Pickelherring, who may have evolved from the clown of Elizabethan drama, crosses borders easily, smuggling in his baggage jokes and comic business that become naturalized.
In their introduction, the collaborators state that, while “our focus in this volume is narrow” (14), it broadens out to a wider sphere of activity. They have sought out, in particular, diplomatic correspondence and traveler's accounts in several languages, piecing together a panoramic mosaic of the influences that led to the performances in Moscow in the late seventeenth century. How Russians abroad reacted to the amusements they were offered and the memories they brought back with them constitute an important element in this development. In this respect, the study is teleological. Everything tends to the eventual description and analysis of the “first Russian plays” acted before Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his family.
The efforts of Simeon Polotskii and Johann Kunst are standard items in most accounts of early Russian theater, but have usually been treated from a literary angle. The authors here bring to bear a wealth of analogous examples, from the Englische Komedianten who toured throughout northern Europe and the baroque spectacles to be seen in France, Italy, Denmark and Sweden. (The combing of Scandinavian archives is especially productive.) The cross-fertilization is shown to be continuous and fruitful, so that the ground was well prepared for the plays of Esther, Adam and Eve, and St George that entertained a royal family that had never before encountered theater. Although this was the farthest remove from a “public” playhouse, its influence was abiding.
The last two chapters represent a culmination, as they discuss the play of Tamerlane and its possible antecedents both in European chronicles and in Christopher Marlowe. They are sedulous in tracing how details differ in editions and translations. How the court spectacle affected later portrayals of the Asian conqueror are then examined. This makes an important contribution to literary and theatrical studies in several cultures.
The language is straightforward and often attractively colloquial. Even in the introduction, whenever academic jargon does appear, it turns out be a quotation from some other authority. The notes and bibliography are exhaustive, the illustrations instructive and amusing, though muddily reproduced on matte paper. This book is to be recommended to all those interested in Russian and European theater and music history, as well as cultural studies in general, as an exemplary model of wide-ranging scholarship and original thinking.
